Bank cards, and in particular, bank cards with credit facilities, are used extensively in every day trading. In the western world, many merchants offering goods and services have facilities for the acceptance of payment via either credit card or EFTPOS.
In the case of credit cards, the user is provided with an approved amount of credit by the credit provider, and is given a credit card, with which the user will be able to make purchases from merchants accepting that credit card.
At present, to receive a credit card payment, the recipient generally needs to have a merchant account. Entities who sell goods and services generally maintain merchant accounts. Through maintaining merchant accounts, merchants who sell goods and services can offer credit card holders the ability to make payments using their credit cards, without incurring high fees and charges. However, a merchant has to bear considerable costs to operate a merchant account. These costs are in the form of annual charges, transaction fees and merchant discounts; charged by the acquiring and card issuing banks. With such charges, small scale merchants will encounter difficulties to operate merchant accounts due to their small volume of transactions.
Currently, a credit card holder through the use of his/her credit card, can make payments to a third party who does not have a credit card payment acceptance system (merchant account) by (1) paying cash to the third party after obtaining the necessary funds through an automated teller machine (ATM) as a cash advance, (2) making a payment using credit card cheque or (3) transferring money electronically to a non-credit account (using Internet). However, all the above payment methods incur high interest, withdrawal fees and other transaction fees.
The proposed invention will offer an effective system that enables the transfer of available credit directly, from one credit card account to another unlinked third party credit card account; where the recipient will be able to receive credit card payment without maintaining a merchant account.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to overcome or substantially ameliorate the disadvantages of the prior art by providing a system of transferring and utilising reusable credit which provides a means for enabling a sender to transfer reusable credit to a recipient for the purchase of goods/services and/or payment to another third party.